


the kingdom of god

by dance_at_bougival



Category: The Borgias
Genre: Gen, prometheus!au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-11
Updated: 2012-12-11
Packaged: 2017-11-20 20:42:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/589434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dance_at_bougival/pseuds/dance_at_bougival
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>all people are driven<br/>to the point of eating their gods<br/>after a time: it's the old greed<br/>for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness<br/>the lust to feel what it does to you<br/>when your teeth meet in divinity. - margaret atwood </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Rodrigo Borgia looks straight into the camera, does not even blink. A king surrounded on all sides by the plunder of technology; he smiles: "we are the gods now."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the kingdom of god

**Author's Note:**

> for ari, who said, more eloquently than i could have done: "In a world where immortality is an actual physical possibility; where gods walk among them ... the actual search for creators/physical immortality as the key to becoming glorious, becoming gods themselves.

> _ I am reporting from the vessel Prometheus; the ship and her entire crew are gone. If you are receiving this transmission, make no attempt to reach its point of origin. There’s only death here now, and I’m leaving it behind. It’s New Year’s Day, the Year of Our Lord 2094. My name is Lucrezia Borgia, last survivor of the Prometheus, _ _and I am still searching._

 

 

 

 

The Cesare model mark 8 was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the average human being.

 

Intelligent, capable, and now emotional; able to blend into any human work force with the minimum amount of dissonance, he was the finest Borgia Industries had to offer—the final result of almost half a century’s experimentation and more than three billion dollars’ worth in nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

 

One little known fact: there is a strand of programming (minute and inseparable from his electronic nerve endings) that threads through the entire inner core system of the creation’s body, centralized and crystallized and specifically tailored for human use; he was also ruthless.

 

"In the absence of your father, madam," he says calmly. "I am entirely yours to command."

 

Her eyes flit from the carefully manufactured pleasantry of his face to his still, long fingers. Something settles inside her; conviction yet not quite conviction. How would they label this in a court of law? _Mens rea_ and _actus reus_ ; the intention and the act.

 

She chooses her words carefully. "He’s becoming a liability."

 

The Cesare mark 8 inclines his head.

 

She watches his retreating back, his steps measured and steady against the titanium floors of the ship. The universe splays out, unmeasured and uncharted around them, whispering relentlessly. _Intention_ , she thinks.

 

All flesh is grass.

 

 

 

"What would you do for the answers you seek?" he asks. “What would you do to win the secrets of the universe?”

_What would you do to gain the affections of your father_? He may as well have asked. _What would you do to prove yourself a worthy son?_

 

Juan Borgia looks up at him, eyes hazed and fingers not quite still; sticky with nervous human sweat. Juan Borgia stares Cesare right in the eyes, and says, “Anything.”

 

Cesare smiles, and hands him a drink. He watches Juan down the whole thing, watches the universe begin to take shape.

 

 

 

The first time she had met him, she was seven, and at an Easter sermon, holding her father’s hand.

 

“God is within us all,” her father, the titan of the future, was fond of saying. “There’s a touch of the divine in all of His creations, love.”

 

“Me too?” She asked, already dreading the sermon—she remembers hating the packed rows of the church, remembers hating the tedium of droning Latin. She would not learn to find music in the written until years later—and that would come in the form of equations, and not dead tongues.

 

Her father tapped her on the nose and she giggled. “More than a touch in you, my love.”

 

He waited for them at the door of the church, hands folded neatly behind his back, suit grey and tailored and pressed into clean, hard lines. He inclined his head upon seeing her father, “Sir.”

 

“Cesare, my boy,” Rodrigo clapped him hard on the back, and Lucrezia remembered dimly that her father had not embraced her brother Juan like that ever before, even when he was sent to boarding school in Spain. She bit her lip. “And this is my little girl. Lucrezia, meet Cesare. Cesare, this is Lucrezia.”

 

Cesare did not coo at her. He did not, as many adults did, pinch her cheeks or smile uncomfortably or hug her without her approval. Instead, Cesare bent until he stared her in the eyes, and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lucrezia.”

 

His face was curiously blank. His mouth did not so much as twist, and his eyes were dark and impenetrable. He stared at her impassively, calmly, and she smiled at him, her brightest and most beautiful; the one that she knew guaranteed her a second helping of desert or a new dress.

 

“It’s nice to meet you too, Cesare,” she replied.

 

When he did smile, there was something almost like warmth in it. Years later, her father will deny it when she mentions it, when she notes at the dinner table how models as early as the Cesare mark 4 had shown signs of human emotion.

 

“Nonsense,” Rodrigo waves his fork in the air. Juan is laughing at her. “We didn’t develop emotional replication until the mark 7, you know that, Crezia.”

_I didn’t say replication_ , she thinks. There is a particular brand of sentience that Rodrigo had not calculated for; but then again, that is a mistake that all creators make. It’s a mistake that will seem foolishly obvious once the created pluck the apple from the tree and bites into the flesh, once the created looks sideways to worship, and not up.

 

“Madame,” Cesare says now, and hands her her drink. She notes the way he watches her throat when she swallows, the way his fingers linger too long on her empty glass. She wonders if in any of her father’s equations, had there been an exact algorithm calculating the risk and influence of lust.

 

But then again, it’s a mistake you don’t notice until the snake winds up the tree, winking, hissing: _fooled you_.

 

 

 

He doesn’t tell her what he did, and she doesn’t ask. When the deed is done he is waiting in her quarters, hands folded behind his back.

 

She is standing in the doorway, her hair loose and soft around her shoulders; he notes the way it falls without quite knowing why. He does not understand how the fall and curl of gold around the sharp inward curve of her chin might assist in any breakdown of protocol, but he files away the sight for future reference like he does everything else.

 

“Your brother should not prove a problem anymore, ma’am.” He says.

 

She nods once, a sharp, jerky movement, and pulls the silk robe tighter over her shoulders. Her feet makes quiet, soft padding sounds across the length of the sprawling living room, and he thinks there is something untouchable about that sound—the sheer softness of it, the suggestion of flesh.

 

“A drink, please, Cesare.” She says quietly.

 

On earth men falter; their hands slip or their eyes are distracted, and the drinks are never perfectly mixed—the ratio of vodka to tonic never precisely measured enough. Cesare makes the drink with his usual economy, and when he hands it to her, her fingers are shaking.

 

“Do you remember,” she says, and there is an undercurrent of something like fear in her voice—though that can’t be right. Borgias are not afraid; that had been the first lesson Rodrigo had taught the two of them; her sitting on his knee, him in algorithms. “When I was a girl, at the estate, and on the nights when father was gone—”

 

She breaks off. He watches her quietly.

 

“I remember,” he replies.

 

She drinks, long and deep, and shuts her eyes. “Prometheus was punished by the gods for trying to elevate humans to their level. Icarus flew too close to the sun, and fell back into the ocean. Bellerophon was struck down by Zeus before he could fly to the top of Mount Olympus.”

 

He chooses his words very carefully. “Those are stories.”

 

Her fingers are pressed, white, against the rim of the glass. “Mother told me that if I came out here,” she says, voice as tight as a drawn string, as thin as the high note of a flute. “I’d die. She told me to take note of the ship, and remember what happened to Prometheus.”

 

Decades ago, Rodrigo Borgia had stood in the centre of a roaring stadium, on the brink of humanity’s greatest success to date, and had prophesized the birth of his only true son. Rodrigo Borgia, the undeniable Prometheus of the modern age, had stared into the camera; a king surrounded on all sides by the plunder of technology, smiling: “we are led to an obvious conclusion. We are the gods now.”

 

Lucrezia Borgia, now sole daughter and heir of a company spanning a hundred and thirty seven industries with a personal net worth of two hundred and eighty nine billion dollars, an empire spanning eleven planets, and all the universe at her finger tips, closes her eyes and bows her head.

 

“The team ran the tests,” she says, and her voice is quiet, trembling. “The DNA matches.”

 

She looks up at him, and her eyes are bright, with the kind of desperation that only animals know. On this very ship one year, three months, four days, fifteen hours and eleven minutes ago, Cesare had watched the bright, all-encompassing death of a star from the captain’s quarters, had sat still and unmoving as the immeasurable black spread of the universe swallowed up the last remnants of a celestial body. He had thought that kind of brightness an inevitable realization; a part of the cosmic order.

 

Stars die. So do gods. In the end, only humans remain, to pick up the pieces and deem it a blessing or a curse.

 

“We found them,” she says. “We found the Engineers.”

 

_There’s more than a touch of divinity in you, my love._

 

He wonders if machines dream.

 

In her dreams, she is small again, blond pigtails bouncing as she ran ahead, a slight lisp when she tugs on his sleeve, and says, “Tell me a story, Cesare.”

 

He complies. The Cesare mark 6 tells her stories about goddesses and heroes, about the great falls of men, about the danger of hubris and the primacy of glory and the aching, terrifying conclusions of love. His voice is calm and flat and cool, but she listens with her chin in her hands, eyes wide and pale and utterly immersed.

 

“Why do you like these stories, Cesare?” she asks the week after she turns a precocious ten. “Don’t you like happy endings?”

 

Aldous Huxley said: “stability is not as spectacular as instability. Happiness is never grand.” Anne Carson wrote: “why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

 

But she is too young for all this; for all the weight of time and for all the inevitability that the universe would like to drag her down with. So the Cesare mark 6, sensitive to the feelings and delicacy of humanity, smiles and says, “I suppose because tragedy touches the soul, Lucrezia. It is the higher form of art.”

 

She glances up at him, and her eyes are young and sly. “But father says you don’t have a soul.”

 

He is thoughtful. If something stirs inside him, white hot and burning and not fully formed, then it doesn’t register, and it doesn’t show up in diagnostics. “No.”

 

“So you are _looking_ for your soul,” Lucrezia smiles, satisfied. “You are looking for God.”

 

When he emerges from her dream, the universe is spread out around him, in the vast sprawling black that does not end; he is entirely alone. If anything happened to them, it would take eighteen minutes for it to matter on earth.

 

This is an alien sense of solitude that he had never known, even when he had been separated from his creators by nerve endings and body fluids. It is only out here, when all the worlds around you are quiet and unmoving, at once alive and dead, when you are alone and falling through a black abyss, that you truly understand the size of your worth.

_I don’t want to find your God,_ he remembers thinking, looking outside as the death of a star wracks this corner of the universe. _I want what anything wants. I want to be free._

 

Aldous Huxley said: “I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

 

The Cesare mark 8 does not have anything so specific in mind. The Cesare mark 8 just _wants_.

 

Along with the emotional replication came the hollowness of humanity; the inevitable, eternal search for an ineffable thing, an indefinable thing. This is the thing that the Church had not taught; the animalistic desperation of the flesh, the impossible realization that God is a state of being, that you must first find Him within your soul.

 

The Cesare mark 8 has no soul; the Cesare mark 8 has no God. The Cesare mark 8 only has orders, and _madam, I am yours to command._

 

 

 

Juan Borgia does not even get to finish his sentence before his sister sentences him.

 

“Crezia, please—” and he is too close. Lucrezia clenches her jaw, and then her brother is on fire, arms thrown out in a wild display of martyrdom.

 

He is watching from a window, a cross turning back and forth between his fingers, and he can read the grief on Sancia d’Aragon’s face when Juan falls, and ceases twitching, the way her brother has to restrain her before she launches herself bodily at Lucrezia.

 

There is enough oxygen for Juan to burn, he notes, and watches the way Lucrezia’s steps only trembles the slightest as she tosses the flamethrower away. When she gestures for the container to be closed, her hand does not shake.

 

“Borgias don’t make mistakes,” Rodrigo was fond of saying. “Borgias don’t forgive mistakes.”

 

He might as well have said _to the strongest_. Cesare tucks the cross into a pocket, and heads down. Now, only the true heirs remain.

 

 

 

In the deep black of space, what strikes first and strikes last is the hunger.

 

In the hours after the briefing and before they break the planet’s atmosphere, she sits alone in her chamber, watching the rock draw near.

 

“If father succeeds,” she says. “Then he’ll live for another hundred years—five hundred, a thousand, who knows?”

 

He does not reply. He is her silence; his own particular brand of cold comfort. She smiles too wide in boardrooms, laughs too easily, lounging on her wing backed chair as if it is a throne; but that particular brand of femininity takes maintenance. It takes work. That kind of softness is sharp enough to draw blood. Light comes out of her in spades, but light illuminates all faults. There is a freedom in the dark; why else would they be here?

 

The universe was born in the dark. Light came after.

 

“Juan will ruin us all,” she says quietly. “And father’s other heirs will be laughed out of the boardroom.”

 

Her small white hand clutches his, tight. He looks down, and something flits, uncontrolled across his face.

 

“I am yours to command.” He says in the deep silence after. “Say the word, and I’ll bring you his heart.”

 

She stares at him for a half-second, stunned, and then her mouth twists into a small smile. “Do I need it, Cesare? I already have yours.”

 

He doesn’t reply.

 

“I don’t want father’s throne.” She says, without looking at him. The planet draws closer, second by second. “I don’t want power. I don’t want immortality.”

 

“What do you want?” But he already knows the answer. He had always known the answer. She has her eyes set on a single goal in the fading distance; the ineffable light in all the deep space. What does he want? What do machines dream of?

_Don’t we all want our parents dead?_ He wonders.

 

“I want—” She stops. He fills in the blanks with words: _love, warmth, safety, home_. “I want to find them. But I don’t know what will happen if I do.”

 

She is quiet for a long time. “The more I search for God, the more he tries me.”

 

What a terrifying thing it is; your creator is your beginning and your end. He is standing on a brink; the terror of evolution, and the freedom of it roaring beneath.

 

The kingdom spreads out in front of him, and there is no God, or vicar, to pull him back.

 

 

 

The Cesare mark 7 met Machiavelli in a white room, an entire wall a flat plane of glass.

 

The man introduces himself as the head of the diagnostics team; trained and focused on keeping his progress on track, making sure that the core of him ticked along according to his programming.

 

“I’m thrilled to meet you,” Machiavelli, a tall thin man in black wire frames, smiles at him. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Mr Borgia tells me that your handling of the situation in Florence was the single most successful undertaking of business that he had seen in some years—a feat for a prince, in all honesty.”

 

Cesare smiles, and inclines his head; a minor calculation of stock points, a calm persuasion measured in the precision of his smile and the cadences of his words—there is not much difference between men and machines. It is still all about pressing the right buttons. “I hope I can assist you in any way I can, Mr Machiavelli.”

 

“There’s no need for that.” Machiavelli takes off his glasses and folds his hands together. “I suppose this must be strange to hear, after all you’ve done for this company—”

 

“You’re here to monitor my emotional responses.” He says lightly, and Machiavelli freezes. “It’s perfectly alright, Niccolo—may I call you Niccolo?—I’m fully aware of the situation. What would you like to know?”

 

The man visibly stills, and Cesare has to bite his lip to hide a smile.

 

“I’ve prepared a set of questions.” He says at last. “It would be very helpful if you’d comply with my analysis.”

 

Cesare makes a small gesture. “By all means.”

 

“I will say a word, and I would like you to reply with the first word that comes to your mind.”

 

“Of course.”

 

Machiavelli clears his throat. “Love.”

 

“Replication.”

 

“Future.”

 

“Me.”

 

Machiavelli smiles. “Human.”

 

His eyes narrow the slightest fraction. “Unattainable.”

 

Machiavelli makes a small note. “God.”

 

His mouth opens, and nothing comes out.

 

Machiavelli looks up, slightly startled. He wonders what he must look like in that second; eyes wide, hands too still. He blinks once, and his face is pleasantly stoic again. Machiavelli leans forward. “Cesare?”

 

“Technology.”

 

Machiavelli’s eyes are narrowed. “Technology.” He repeats.

 

“Yes.” Cesare replies without the slightest hitch in his voice. “Technology is God the future, and the future is me, Niccolo. It’s a well-known and well-evidenced thesis.”

 

“Ah, yes, of course.” Machiavelli says, and his eyes are sly. “Just one more, if you’d indulge me.”

 

“Of course.”

 

A long pause. He is ready this time. “Lucrezia.”

_God_. “Sister.”

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

In the end, there is only the two of them.

 

His sister is standing with her hands behind her back while he fires up the Engineer’s ship. The machine roars to life, and he thinks of the bodies of Sancia d’Aragon and Alfonso d’Aragon and Juan Borgia and Perotto and his creator beneath them, lying sprawled and ruined by the planet’s filth. The road to heaven is paved with the bodies of men.

 

“You are sure about this?” He asks.

 

She does not look at him. “I need answers. I want to know why. They owe it to me.” She turns around, and her smile is radiant; for a single fraction of a second, the breath catches in his throat. “And you’re with me. I don’t fear anything.”

 

The planet’s sun peeks out at them through grey fog, basking the entire room in a spread of gold. Under the new light of a foreign sun, her hair glints like silk strands. _I am free,_ he thinks suddenly. _I am free to be bound however I wish._

 

What do machines dream of? What do you dream of, Cesare?

_Does it matter?_ He wonders. _Why do men crusade? Why do men fight wars? What is it about humanity that gives it its convictions of glory?_

 

The ship rises, and the ground trembles under their feet. He is staring at her small, curved frame as they break through the atmosphere.

_God_ , he understands, suddenly. _Men can achieve anything with their God at their side._

_What do you want, Cesare?_

 

This is how the history of humanity is written; a man, a woman, forbidden knowledge. A man, a woman, paradise. A man, a woman; a worshipper at the feet of his beloved, his teeth biting into the fruit in his goddess’s hand.

 

We are taking back the kingdom of God.

 

“Go,” Lucrezia whispering, staring off into the distant horizon. “Cesare, fly.”

 


End file.
